0

Apple announced today at its event at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens that its forthcoming update to OS X, Mavericks, will come at no cost to consumers. This is a change for Apple, a company that in the past charged for updates to its desktop operating system.

Those fees were low — less than $50 — but they existed. And by dropping the cost of OS X updates to zero, Apple is following in Microsoft’s footsteps. Microsoft, of course, recently released its Windows 8.1 update to Windows 8 for free to all Windows 8 users.

If Apple were to charge for the update to OS X after Microsoft — a company notorious for high software prices — made its own update free, Apple would appear quite miserly.

Now, there are some small pieces to keep in mind. Given that Apple only sells OS X as a component of its PC line, it therefore only charges for its operating system as part of its hardware. Microsoft sells Windows as a standalone product, given that people still build their own PCs.

So, Apple now won’t charge for OS X directly ever, or at least ever again. This puts Microsoft in a spot somewhat of its own making: It cannot charge for OS updates ever again. Microsoft can keep charging for Windows as a standalone product, both directly to consumers and to its OEM partners, but that’s different.